I doubt that the public is as sceptical as Sir John Sulston suggests in his excellent article "Why won't the public put their faith in scientists?" (June 10). The problem is the intercession of politics and the pretension of the politician to speak for the public. The view that scientific discoveries are socially determined is due to the malign influence of Marxising. The academic response to this has been to stress the positive social benefits of "science" (actually, technology), and thus to align with political schemes for organising scientific efforts.
Although Sulston stresses the independence of truly scientific thinking, even he thinks that it is the business of the Government to "balance" such diverse interests as commerce, science and the state. The idea that this represents "democracy" in action is far from the truth: the public is unable to articulate all its concerns. Sulston apparently approves of "onerous legislation" to deal with scandals such as Porton Down and Alder Hey, but he ignores the fact that the first case was under government auspices and amounted to deliberate human experimentation.
The claims of "society" are made the justification for all kinds of governmental interference. But, again, Sulston wants to make ethical considerations subject to "democratic" control - inviting further government intervention. In ethical decisions, he says, "the expert has just one vote like everyone else", but how can ethics be divorced from science if it is, as he argues, based on principles that can only be described as moral?
Sulston's anti-academic attitude ("Reading rots the mind") is refreshing in its awareness that true originality approaches its subject directly, but isn't his description of science as "essential anarchy" very misleading? An original mind is not critical for the sake of it but to establish a new and truer orientation towards reality. However, such a view too easily fits with the wish to subject scientific research to some overall control. Sulston repudiates the idea of a scientists' professional code, but this view of science inevitably leads towards one.
Finally, the limitations of science need to be stressed: it is unable, as he admits, to render definite answers to moral and spiritual questions - notwithstanding the fact that it is, in itself, a profoundly moral activity.
Science is not a substitute for faith but depends on it, at least in its form of passionate commitment to the understanding of objective reality. Perhaps this is its downfall: it sets man in critical awareness over and against a reality always external to him, and therefore it cannot achieve the transcendental awareness to be gained from art or religion. Do public reservations about the scope of science reflect an awareness of science's humanistic limitations?
Nigel Probert
Porthmadog